Assistant Professor, Ph.D.

African American and
African Diaspora

Department of Art & Art History

Curriculum Vitae

cherise_smith@mail.utexas.edu

- Office: ART 1.205

- Phone: +1 512-232-1822

- Mail Code: - D1300

Assistant Professor Cherise Smith joined the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin in 2005. She offers courses in and has published articles on African American and African Diaspora art, the history of photography, and contemporary art. Her manuscript, En-Acting 'Others': Identity Performance in Works by Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith, is in progress. It examines how identity is negotiated in performance art by reading closely a performance work by each artist in which she takes-on the characteristics and manners of a racial, ethnic, and gender "other". She interprets the works as public actions against social conventions and private acts of self-fashioning, and considers the political implications of occupying the liminal space of being self and "other" simultaneously. She has worked in the curatorial departments of several museums and curated a number of exhibitions.